Accessible Indian Bubbles: A Radio Show in New Zealand!

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 23:47:53 +0530

At the recent ACM conference at IIIT-Hyderabad, we met , one of the keynote speakers and a professor at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand.

Otago Polytechnic is one of the southernmost universities in the world. They aim to have all their graduating students be able to “think and act as sustainability practitioners” irrespective of their areas of expertise. Sam has pioneered this program and has authored a book titled The Green Graduate on the same.

He also hosts a weekly radio show, Blowing Bubbles, on Otago Access Radio. After learning about , he invited us to record an episode for his show, which was broadcast on Dec 13.

We talked about teaching accessibility from various angles: what we are doing and why we are doing it, to whether accessibility should be taught in a separate course or be a part of all CS courses, to our superpowers, to what gets us going in the morning, to the challenges and opportunities we foresee in the coming few years.

It was great talking to Sam about these and many other things (outside the podcast). I hope you will enjoy listening to our conversation.

I found his characterisation that “People with disabilities is the largest minority anyone can become a part of in a heartbeat” very insightful.

After the recording, I asked Sam what his superpower is, and he said he can find anything exciting. Isn’t that fascinating!

Go to the Podcast

Teaching Digital Accessibility through Serious Games

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 12:45:18 +0530

Background

The estimates that more than a billion people live with some form of disability. The mandates countries to “… promote the design, development, production, and distribution of accessible information and communications technologies and systems…”. To accomplish this, concepts and skills needed to develop accessible products and services must be included in computing education. Software companies like , , , and emphasize making their products accessible, and accessibility often features as a preferred skill in their job postings. For instance, a current for a Software Engineer position specifies “Experience developing accessible technologies” as a preferred qualification.

The Problem

Despite such increasing awareness in the software industry about accessibility in the recent years, many . Software professionals point to for this gap in implementing accessibility.

According to the , the main barriers to teaching accessibility include the lack of clear learning objectives about accessibility and their lack of knowledge about accessibility. Also, most instructors who teach accessibility have a background in human-computer interaction (HCI) and related fields and teach these topics in specialized courses. This indicates that other instructors may find it challenging to build their expertise and to incorporate accessibility topics in “mainstream” CS courses.

Our Contribution

We have developed fun, self-paced learning interventions, in the form of three sets of games:

Accessibility Awareness: (a) a special version of Wordle that asks you to guess a five-letter word, and tells you how it relates to accessibility, and (b) a game that asks you to burst the bubbles that carry a myth about accessibility, while saving the ones that carry a fact.
Access Quest: A role playing game that helps you learn WCAG guidelines about accessibility by solving puzzles and challenges a software developer may face in a day-to-day life.
Bug Hunter: A race against time game with a goal to find as many accessibility bugs in a web page as possible. The game is designed to assess your knowledge of WCAG guidelines.

You can try out these games at

We welcome your feedback and suggestion.

This project is supported by the

and BITS Pilani Research Initiation Grant.

Sugamyata | Swaroop Joshi

Accessible Indian Bubbles: A Radio Show in New Zealand!

Teaching Digital Accessibility through Serious Games

Background

The Problem

Our Contribution